During the next five-year period, RTRN will witness a significant expansion of its collaborative research capability. The Research Coordinating Center (RCC) will nurture innovative ideas and research questions, generated from within and beyond the RCMI grantee institutions and within the lay community, by serving as the central coordination and communications hub to spur cross-institutional mentoring and professional development, inter-institutional collaborations, partnerships and resource sharing, and project development, project implementation and performance monitoring. This will be accomplished through a network-wide collaborative effort that will leverage and coordinate the existing key function activities o f t h e RCMI basic science centers (known as RCMI) and RCMI clinical and translational research centers (known as RCTR). Importantly, the overall RTRN operational construct will be predicated on a federated model, which can be best described as T r a n s l a t i o n a l Research W i t h o u t Borders. That is, RTRN will not be constrained by traditional boundaries as defined by discipline, approach, technology, dogma, institution and/or geography. The overall objective o f t h e RCC will be to strengthen and expand capabilities for collaborative, multi-site clinical trials and community-partnered studies on diseases that disproportionately affect underserved ethnic minority and geographically remote populations. To engage basic, clinical, community and translational scientists within and beyond the RCMI community, the RCC will employ the communications and technology infrastructure o f t h e DCC in facilitating access to research support services (such as grants review), databases for research networking and resource discovery, and funding opportunities (such as the Small Grants Program).